


and i feel gay in this chili's tonight

by bbyfruit



Series: skam fic week! [3]
Category: SKAM (TV)
Genre: F/F, SKAM Fic Week, this is a mess just a psa
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-19
Updated: 2017-08-19
Packaged: 2018-12-17 04:47:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,493
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11844237
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bbyfruit/pseuds/bbyfruit
Summary: eva loves vilde from across an office, through boyfriends and girlfriends and lunch breaks and life.





	and i feel gay in this chili's tonight

**Author's Note:**

> ...loosely based on jim and pam :-)

It’s eight in the motherfucking morning and Eva’s exhausted, leaning over Vilde’s desk, her elbows resting on the plastic surface as she props her head up.

“Why we do this to ourselves?” Eva says, pouting. “Like, as humans, why did we collectively decide that we had to wake up early to work?”

Vilde furrows her eyebrow like she’s actually thinking about it, swiveling slightly in her chair for a second before she answers, “Something to do with farming, probably?”

“God,” Eva groans, collapsing against the desk.

“Coffee?” Vilde offers sympathetically. She holds up her mug with both hands, pink fingernails against green, and Eva takes it gently, covering Vilde’s hands with her own. There’s a solid few seconds where Vilde doesn’t let go. Her fingers are trapped beneath Eva’s and she’s looking up at Eva so openly, eyes wide and she’s just waiting until --

“You left your lunch in my car,” William says, dropping a bag on the table without blinking. Vilde slides her hands away from Eva.

“Hi,” Vilde answers. She spins in her chair to see William and Eva takes a sip, coffee too sweet and burning in the back of her mouth and she leaves the cup on Vilde’s desk and heads back to her own with her heart in her throat, because she’s twenty-three and working in a dead end job and she’s in love with a straight girl.

* * *

 

Eva throws a party for the office because that’s what she does on Friday nights. 

It’s the first time that she’s ever seen the people that she works without outside of the office, even though they’ve been working together for a couple years. It’s weird to see everyone in their normal clothes, how they present themselves when they have a choice, and it’s weird to see people joking and knocking back beers and dicking around like they actually  _ enjoy  _ each other’s company.

The night’s pretty tame, by Eva’s standards -- the most dramatic thing that happened was that Isak brought his boyfriend and Emma locked herself in the bathroom to cry. 

Vilde’s late and Eva’s trying not to notice. She deals with the Emma situation as best as she can, telling her supportive phrases through the door while making faces at Isak. She refills drinks and laughs and ends up talking to Sana, who she’s never really talked to before but is surprisingly a fuckton cooler than she assumed. She sets up a karaoke machine and pretends that she’s having fun. Eventually, though, she looks around and sees everyone split off into little groups of threes and fours, heads bent together and Eva’s on the outside in her own home. She’s suddenly tired, so she leaves her roommate Chris in charge, makes her  _ promise _ not to try to breakdance again, and heads to her room and closes the door.

“Eva?”

She’s laying on her bed with her shoes off. “Vilde?” 

“Hi,” Vilde grins down at her brightly, walking through Eva’s bedroom door to stand next to her bed. “Can I lay down with you?”

Eva’s heart thuds and her lungs constrict and she smiles like she feels nothing, slides over to make room for Vilde and says, “Of course.”

Gently, Vilde gets on the bed, her weight barely even making the mattress dip, laying on her back in the same position that Eva is, the two of them side by side.

“Where’s William?” Eva asks, because she can’t help it.

And Vilde doesn’t answer, just brings her shoulder up to her ear in a motion that Eva can’t see but she can feel. Eva tries, desperately and unsuccessfully, to  _ not  _ be delighted by the fact that William and Vilde aren’t together tonight.

“Why are you in here all alone?” Vilde says cheerfully. Eva decides to ignore the fact that Vilde’s so blatantly changing the subject. “It’s your party.”

“Not feeling it,” Eva says. She’s quiet, turning her head to the side to see Vilde’s profile, watching her blink under the yellow light from the corner of Eva’s room.

“That’s okay.” Slowly, Vilde turns her head to face Eva, their eyes meeting and she smiles. “Is it cool if I chill here with you then?”

And she doesn’t know what to feel with Vilde in her bed, Vilde looking at her and talking to her and smiling at her, because she’s  _ hurting _ knowing that Vilde’s right beside her but she can’t touch her, hurting from her heart to her toes to her teeth.

“So this is your room?” Vilde says after a few minutes of both of them just looking at each other. She tilts back her head and looks around, taking in the posters on the wall and the worn vinyl records stacked on the counter, flannels slung over The Chair in a messy pile. “It’s cute. It feels like you,” she adds.

Vilde stands and starts to look around the room, standing on her tiptoes to peek at Jonas’s drawings that are hanging on the wall. Eva sighs. She turns her head back to look up at the ceiling. Every once in a while, it feels like there’s  _ something _ between her and Vilde, a little twinge of burning in the way that Vilde’s eyelashes flicker down and it ruins her every single time. She lets her mind wander too far sometimes. She lets herself hope. She tricks herself into believing that it’s real, and then Vilde breaks eye contact to find William and Eva’s heart breaks every single day.

“Oh my God,” Vilde gasps, leaning into Eva’s desk to look at something. “Is this you?”

Eva sits up and frowns, trying to figure out what Vilde’s looking at, but then --

“Shit, don’t look at that!” Eva bounces up from the bed to grab at Vilde’s arm, laughing, because she knows that Vilde’s looking at that one picture from when Eva was ten and she’d discovered that she could cut her hair with safety scissors and bangs were  _ all _ the rage, and that one tooth had fallen out and made her smile crooked. 

Vilde giggles just looking at it, blocking Eva from grabbing the picture with her arm. “That’s adorable.”

* * *

 

Getting drunk and hitting on hot girls is gay culture, Eva decides one night, and she picks up a girl with red lipstick and blue eyes and takes her home and doesn’t let her go. She doesn’t let her go until one night Noora’s waiting for her at an art exhibit and Eva’s on her way, she swears, when Vilde calls her crying, barely able to get out the words because William’s once again told her some awful shit, broke off their engagement and broke her heart.

“I’m so sorry,” Eva says into the phone, running her hand through her hair. “Look, I’ll make it up to you, okay? I’ll make you dinner, or whatever you want.”

Noora sighs harshly. “Yeah, Eva, you always say that. This is like, the third time you’ve pulled shit like this and dropped me for Vilde’s drama.”

“I don’t drop you,” Eva argues, desperate and she’s almost to Vilde’s apartment, “like, Jesus, Noora, she’s my best friend. She’s going through a lot right now.”

Silence. And then Noora says, bitterly, “We’ll talk about this later. Come over to mine when you’re done with Vilde tonight.”

Eva spends the night at Vilde’s, forgets to call, and Noora breaks up with her two days later.

* * *

 

“William and I are back together,” Vilde says one day in the break room when she’s making coffee and Eva’s got her legs propped up on the table eating a yogurt. She swallows her disappointment with a spoonful of mixed berry.

“Are we… happy about that?” Eva asks cautiously. 

Vilde spins and smiles brightly and it doesn’t reach her eyes and Eva doesn’t comment on it because Vilde’s her best friend and the person she’s in love with, no matter how many times she convinces herself she’s over Vilde. 

“We are,” Vilde answers, bright and cheery. 

“How’d that happen?”

“I mean,” Vilde shrugs, offering Eva a soft smile. She’s always offering. “It’s  _ William _ ,” she says, like that’s an explanation, like she can just say that and Eva will understand.

The thing is, Eva  _ does  _ understand. William is familiar. It’s part of the reason Eva always ended up back with Jonas for years before she realized that she couldn’t live in safety, attached to what she’d always known and unable to grow unless they broke up. And a part of her wants to tell that to Vilde, draw all the parallels and use all the right words, but she has to maintain that balance -- the balance between best friend and lover and coworker, so she stays quiet, just looks at Vilde and says, “Right.”

“He’s the best,” Vilde says, sitting down across from Eva. It sounds like she’s trying to convince herself just as much as she’s trying to convince Eva. “Like, I know we broke up, but it’s so easy to forget that, you know? It just feels like normal. Like how it’s supposed to be.”

Eva pulls a smile across her face and watches Vilde. She’s looking down into her coffee, fingernails plucking at her cuticles and eyelashes dark against her skin. Eva just nods.

* * *

 

She’s walking with Vilde down the stairs on a Friday afternoon and it’s sunny when they emerge from the office building, light falling on Vilde’s hair and across her face and she looks like she’s glowing.

William’s standing outside of his car. He doesn’t even say hi to Vilde, just looks past her to Eva, eyes scanning up and down her body and he says, “Emma, right?”

“Eva,” she corrects through gritted teeth.

Two years ago, when Eva first met William, she’d thought he was nice, if a little robotic. And then she fell in love. But, she thinks, even if she wasn’t head over heels, she’d still think William was a massive dick, controlling and manipulative and sucking the life out of Vilde.

“Yeah,” William says. He’s in the car and then he’s driving away with Vilde in the passenger seat and Eva feels like sitting on the curb and crying, so she does, snot running out of her nose and sweeping her hands over her eyes. 

Someone sits beside her and she can’t stop now that she’s started, so she just keeps crying with her head between her hands.

“Mahdi and I tricked Magnus into searching for hidden treasure for five hours today,” Isak says.

She tilts her head to the side to look at him but he’s just staring straight ahead, thoughtful, with his keys in his hand.

Eva sniffles and lets out a watery laugh, asking, “What?”

“Yeah,” he says. He turns to meet her eyes, stretches up and grins crookedly. “Sana and I are going out for dinner with our boyfriends if you want to join. You won’t be a fifth wheel,” Isak promises her. 

He sticks out his hand.

She takes it.

* * *

 

Eva calls Sana while she’s making pancakes and waits for her to pick up, humming with the phone pinched between her shoulder and her ear. 

“Listen,” she says immediately, not even waiting for Sana to greet her. “I think I’m over Vilde. Like, really, truly, over Vilde.”

“Yeah, no you’re not.”

Eva sighs. “Trust me this time.”

“Eva,” Sana says firmly, and Eva knows that she’s gearing up for a  _ speech _ . “You’ve been in love with Vilde since you were twenty-three. You can’t just love someone for two whole years and then get over her within a week. Like, literally, last week you were texting Isak about her. I’m pretty sure your exact words were, ‘I’m crying I love her.’ And yes, Isak and I text about you behind your back. Deal with it.”

The pancake is starting to burn. “I’m trying a new thing,” Eva pouts, even though Sana can’t see her through the phone.

Sana’s silent for a second. “Does it have anything to do with Vilde’s new bullshit about believing something until it happens or whatever?”

And Sana’s hit the nail on the head again, like she always does, and Eva’s answer comes slow and petulant.

“...No.”

* * *

 

Sometimes, Eva stays at the office after the workday ends, just because she likes the way there’s a little hum in the air from all the computers that she can’t hear during the day. And, to be honest, because she’s got nothing to go home to but Chris and recorded reality television shows.

“I thought I’d find you here.” Vilde’s voice echoes a little bit and Eva starts. 

“Hey,” Eva says. She can’t help but smile a little bit just to see her, dressed in pink with her hair tied back and perched on the side of Eva’s desk.

“So,” Vilde says slowly, swinging her legs. “I broke up with William for real this time.”

“Is this just you saying it so it’ll come true?” Eva says. She’s cautious, had her heart broken too many times, and she leans back to look at Vilde.

“No. It’s been, like, two months now. I wanted to wait to until I knew I wasn’t going back to him.”

“Holy shit,” Eva says, leaning forward. “Are you okay?”

There’s something in Vilde’s eyes that looks almost like hope when she says, “I’m okay.”

Eva believes her.

* * *

 

They’re drinking champagne in Eva’s bed on New Year’s Eve because they’re both alone and generally messy people, leaning into each other and wearing pajamas.

“I think this is going to be a really good year,” Vilde says dreamily at one point.

Eva hums, full of bubbles and fluff. “I know it is.”

* * *

 

“I think,” Eva says slowly, sitting on the roof of their office building under the night sky beside Vilde, “that I want to quit.”

Vilde turns to look at her, brows furrowed and mouth frowning, and she asks, “Why would you want that?”

“I’m not happy. I want to, like,  _ do _ something important, not just sit at a computer.”

There’s a silence that stretches between them, built out of years of looking at each other across the office and years of Eva loving Vilde from afar, and then Vilde breaks it.

“I don’t think I can be here without you,” she whispers.

It’s been years and Eva’s heart is  _ tired _ , worn out from keeping secrets and staying silent and she says it without thinking because she’s watching Vilde watch the stars with her chest aching.

“I’m in love with you.”

Vilde’s breath catches and Eva can hear it, but she’s not scared anymore. She waits.

“You -- with me?” Vilde asks incredulously.

“Yes.”

Vilde kisses her with lips that taste like strawberries and a smile pressing into her and for the first time in what feels like forever, Eva doesn’t hurt. There’s a weight off her chest and a song in her lungs and Vilde on her lip and this, she thinks, this is how it’s supposed to be. This is how she loves.

  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> messy as fuck but also..... im in my lesbian feels over this
> 
> hmu for some Good Lesbian Vilde Discussion(tm) on [tumblr](https://lesbovilde.tumblr.com/)


End file.
